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Originally Posted by bhartman36
Yes. Yes, they would.
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And I thought it was a rhetorical question.
But apparently some people would rather deprive schoolkids of textbooks than allow them to have textbooks on a platform they dislike.
Wonderful.
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This scheme means that, for authors that choose Apple's authoring software, there's no choice in format, very little choice in device, and no choice in where to get the books from.
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Well, it is authoring software designed to create iBooks. Not e-books. Which are only available for iDevices now.
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At least Amazon doesn't force users to use only Kindles.
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True. You can also use Kindle Apps. Big difference.
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Apple's trying to get a lock-in on a sinister, almost handlebar-mustache scale of evil.
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Yes, Snidely Whiplash was always writing textbooks for children before tying the woman to the railroad tracks.
Second - "evil?" Seriously "evil?" I don't think you know what the word means.
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It's one thing to say, "Our software only publishes to our devices" (even though that's an amount of lock-in that I'm not entirely comfortable with). It's quite another to say, "If you use our software, any content you create is partially ours, and you can't sell it anywhere else." That's just ludicrous.
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Here's a free product you can use to create iBooks. If you use the program to create free iBooks, you can distribute it however you want. If you are going to charge for the iBook, you need to sell the book through iTunes.
Sorry, that just doesn't meet the test of evil. If authors don't want to use the product, they're free not to. Just as they would be free to not use a product that cost too much. (And it's not evil to charge for software, either).
It's not like you are required to use this program to write an iBook...and it's not even like iBooks are a significant part of the market. But I don't think that the conditions are particularly evil.
(I may be wrong, but I also don't think that the program will be very successful...while I think that e-textbooks will (eventually) be the future, I don't think that the interactive part of the textbooks is much more than a gimmick. (It's a little more than a gimmick, but not a lot more.) It's cool that you can see a DNA strand rotate...but when it comes down to what HS kids learn about DNA in biology, the rotation won't cause them to actually learn any more than they would from a color picture.
Also, mac only is too limiting.